SES ASTRA and ORF announced at the International Broadcasting Convention IBC 2004 in Amsterdam the signing of a long-term agreement on the use of additional ASTRA transponder capacity by Austria’s leading public broadcaster.
ORF will start utilizing the additional transmission capacity on ASTRA’s orbital position of 19.2° East in 2004. At the same time, the existing contracts between ORF and SES ASTRA have been extended. The agreement further consolidates a mutually beneficial partnership that has been in place for many years.
Andreas Gall, Technical Director of ORF, commented: “With the extension of our transponder capacity we have, on the one hand, laid the foundation for providing our TV viewers and radio audiences with best-quality programs and improvements to current services for years to come. Furthermore, with these new transmission capacites we can extend our role as a service provider for other TV, radio and data suppliers. With our existing know-how we can provide a full service offer for these clients – from the encryption and the up-linking to the transmission itself.”
Ferdinand Kayser, President and CEO of SES ASTRA, stated: “We are very pleased about this extension of our cooperation with such a renowned public broadcasting company as ORF. The expanded product range offered by our longstanding partner will further enhance the programming choice available from Europe’s most popular orbital position of 19.2°East.”
Also at IBC 2004, SES ASTRA and Clear Television Network from the Netherlands announced a contract for the digital free-to-air satellite distribution of Clear TV, a new Dutch TV channel across Europe. The channel, which primarily serves viewers interested in other cultures, will start on 15 September via the ASTRA Satellite System at 19.2° East. All programmes will be broadcast in the original languages and subtitled in Dutch.
“We believe that the amount of interesting and entertaining programs from other countries and cultures broadcast via the existing Dutch TV networks is rather limited”, says Vanessa Somers, general manager of Clear TV. From 15 September onwards, Clear TV will therefore broadcast free-to-air via ASTRA a broad mix of entertaining and interesting programmes from a variety of countries from all over the world. Somers says: “Clear TV will feature multiple genres: films, series, game shows and lots of sport. We focus on non-mainstream sports, which are currently offered only limited airtime on Dutch television. This means not only sports such as martial arts and water sports, but also squash, rugby and basketball.
Broadcasting free-to-air via ASTRA at 19.2 degrees East, Clear TV can be received by 10,4 million digital DTH homes throughout Europe, of which circa 500.000 are in the Netherlands.